Publisher's Synopsis
In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles andcolours. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur-the people are too much arace of gadabouts to maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, theyhave a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. TheChinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. TheScotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that acurtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains-a nation of hangmen. TheRussians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way.The Yankees alone are preposterous.How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy of blood, andhaving therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned forourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the placeand perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By atransition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, wehave been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself
